Bellur & Halebidu in karnataka were two places which were on our travel plan for quite long time because of their archeological importance in karnataka,but we never got a good reason to do this trip. atlast a week end we started towards these historic places.

Halebidu was the 12th century capital of the hoyasalas The Hoysaleswara temple was built during this time by Ketamala and attributed to Vishnuvardhan the Hoysala ruler. It enshrines Hoysaleswara and Shantaleswara, named after the temple builder Vishnuvardhana Hoysala and his wife, Queen Shantala.

Then it was sacked by the armies of Malik kafur in the early 14th century, after which it fell into a state of disrepair and neglect.

Currently Halebidu is facing serious problems of decaying infrastructure, including a lack of basic amenities like toilets and drinking water.The temples are said to be in a dilapidated state.

some of the sculptures here was very famous for instance the Darpan sundari is of great historic importance

and also famous is the famous sculpture of the lady with drums..

after watching these places we moved on to see the shiva temple situated in bellur,which is near by halebidu,karnataka .

But the main attraction of the entire trip was the huge nandi sculptures in bellur temple which gave me this beautiful picture